Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups (6 page)
Read Dead Wrong: Straight Facts on the Country's Most Controversial Cover-Ups Online
Authors: Richard Belzer,David Wayne
Tags: #History, #United States, #General, #Political Science, #History & Theory, #Social Science, #Conspiracy Theories
Falls into the sea or swiftly flowing rivers may suffice if the subject cannot swim. It will be more reliable if the assassin can arrange to attempt rescue, as he can thus be sure of the subject’s death and at the same time establish a workable alibi.
If the subject’s personal habits make it feasible, alcohol may be used [2 words excised] to prepare him for a contrived accident of any kind.
Falls before trains or subway cars are usually effective, but require exact timing and can seldom be free from unexpected observation.
“ … evidence from 1953 demonstrates a concerted pattern of concealment and deception on the part of those persons and agencies most closely associated with—and most likely to be accountable for—a homicide most foul in the death of Dr. Olson … The confluence of scientific fact and investigative fact points unerringly to the death of Frank Olson as being a homicide, deft, deliberate, and diabolical.”
21
Olson’s son, Eric Olson, who is Director of
The Frank Olson Legacy Project
and has literally spent decades researching the circumstances of his father’s death, deserves the last word here and, frankly, no one could put it more eloquently:
“What this means for me is that a national security homicide is not only a possibility, but really it is a necessity, when you have a certain number of ingredients together. If you are doing top secret work that is immoral, arguably immoral, especially in the post-Nuremberg period, and arguably illegal, and at odds with the kind of high moral position you are trying to maintain in the world, then you have to have a mechanism of security which is going to include murder.”
22
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Terrible Mistake:
The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments
; H. P. Albaselli Js.; 2009, TrineDay.
The Biology of Doom:
The History of America’s Secret Germ Warfare Project
, Ed Regis, 2000.
The Men Who Stare at Goats,
Jon Ronson, 2005.
Code Name: Artichoke;
The CIA’s Secret Experiments on Humans
, film by Egmont R. Koch & Michael Wech, 2002,
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/code-name-/chdr-name-artichoke/
.
“The Frank Olson Legacy Project,”
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Contents.html
.
“LSD, Murder and the CIA: Frank Olson, Enemy Combatant,” David Swanson,
Counterpunch
, March 26-28, 2010.
“Scientist was ‘Killed to Stop Him Revealing Death Secrets’: So Did Cheney and Rumsfeld Cover Up a CIA Assassination?,” Gordon Thomas,
London Sunday Express
, August 25, 2002.
“The Case of Frank Olson,” Olives Boothby, February 11, 1996:
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Student%20papers/Oliver.html
.
“Frank Olson: Did a government scientist jump to his death from a New York hotel? Or was he pushed?,”
Unsolved.com
http://www.uncolved.com/ajaxfiles/une_frank_ olson.htm
.
“Rumsfeld & Cheney’s Dirty Little Spy Secret,” Fintan Dunne, Editor,
GuluFuture.com
, March 6, 2006,
http://www.apfn.nrt/messageboard/03-06-06/discussion.cgi.31.html
.
7
James E. Starrs with Katherine Ramsland,
A Voice for the Dead: A Forensic Investigator’s Pursuit of the Truth in the Grave
(New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 2005).
8
David Swanson, “LSD, Murder and the CIA: Frank Olson, Enemy Combatant,”
Counterpunch
, 26-28 Mar. 2010.
9
H. P. Albarelli Jr.,
A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments
(TrineDay, 2011).
10
Joint Chiefs of Staff 1837/26, “Biological Warfare: Memorandum by the Joint Advanced Study Committee for the Joint Chiefs of Staff,” 21 September 1951, Combined Chiefs of Staff 385.2, sec. 13, RG 330, NARA: JCS 1837/26, “Statements of Policy and Directives on Biological Warfare,” 3 July 1952, Combined Chiefs of Staff 385.2, sec. 15, RG 273.
11
Stephen Endicott & Edward Hagerman,
The United States and Biological Warfare: Secrets from the Early Cold War and Korea
, Indiana University Press, 1998.
12
Walker M. Mahurin,
Honest John: The Autobiography of Walker M. Mahurin
, (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1962).
13
Amy Goodman, “An Inside Look at How U.S. Interrogators Destroyed the Mind of Jose Padilla,” August 16, 2007, DemocracyNow.org,
http://www.democracynow.org/2007/8/16/exclusive_an_inside_look_at_how
(accessed 14 May 2011).
14
Unsolved.com
, “Frank Olson: Did a government scientist jump to his death from a New York Hotel? Or was he pushed?,”
http://www.unsolved.com/ajaxfiles/une_frank_olson.htm
(accessed 2 Feb. 2011).
15
Stephen Endicott, “Memo from Stephen Endicott, Professor of History, York University, analyzing the documents obtained by the Olson family from CIA Director William Colby in June 1975,”
FrankOlsonProject.org
, February 4, 1999,
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Sources/Notes%20on%20items%20&%20events/Endicott-Analysis.html
(accessed 16 Feb. 2011).
16
Unsolved.com
, “Frank Olson: Did a government scientist jump to his death from a New York Hotel? Or was he pushed?,”
http://www.unsolved.com/ajaxfiles/une_frank_olson.htm
(accessed 2 Feb. 2011).
17
Gordon Thomas, “Scientist was ‘killed to stop him revealing death secrets’; So did Cheney and Rumsfeld cover up a CIA assassination?”
London Sunday Express
, August 25, 2002,
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/LondonExpress.html
(accessed 14 Jan. 2011).
18
Gordon Thomas, “Scientist was ‘killed to stop him revealing death secrets’; So did Cheney and Rumsfeld cover up a CIA assassination?”
London Sunday Express
, August 25, 2002,
http://www.frankolsonproject.org/Articles/LondonExpress.html
(accessed 14 Jan. 2011).
19
Serendipity, “The Frank Olson Murder,”
http://www.serendipity.li/cia/olson2.htm
(accessed 14 May 2011).
20
Central Intelligence Agency,
A Study of Assassination
, 1954 (National Security Archive Center, Washington University), Released via Freedom of Information Act, May 23, 1997.
21
Starrs with Ramsland,
A Voice for the Dead.
22
Code Name: Artichoke; The CIA’s Secret Experiments on Humans
, film by Egmont R. Koch & Michael Wech, 2002,
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/code-name-artichoke/
.
| VICTIM | FRANK OLSON |
| Cause of Death | Fell from the thirteenth-story window of his hotel in New York City. |
| Official Verdict | “SUICIDE”: Coroner cited autopsy findings indicating that the victim jumped from his window. In 1975, the CIA admitted doping Olson with LSD that led to his suicide (what is known in intelligence parlance as a “limited hangout”) and settled out of court with the Olson family for $750,000 precluding further investigation. Olson’s family had the body exhumed and re-autopsied in the 1990s and forensic experts concluded that Olson was murdered; the New York District Attorney’s office conducted a murder investigation but never filed criminal charges. |
| Actual Circumstances | Olson’s death was a clear-cut case of “National Security homicide.” As head of CIA bio-weapons research, he had extensive access to “state secrets.” One of those secrets was that bombs with the anthrax virus had apparently been dropped on North Korea. He’d become increasingly outraged and vocal by what he saw as an immoral use of his research. He told colleagues he was disturbed about evidence of CIA torture-to-death interrogations in Germany and bacteriological warfare on North Korea. He was deemed a security risk and was interviewed by Military Intelligence. He was drugged with LSD without his knowledge (or permission) and further interrogated about his plans. On the Monday immediately preceding his death, he informed his boss that he was quitting his job (he died the following Saturday). That weekend, he was booked into the Hotel Statler in New York City accompanied by a CIA agent who was constantly guarding him. He was then visited by a military doctor, and once again drugged, and apparently clubbed and pushed out the window of the hotel (the window was closed at the time) and found dying on the sidewalk. A phone call was placed by the CIA agent immediately afterwards (and overheard by a hotel operator) in which the agent stated only: “Well, he’s gone.” Exhumation and autopsy revealed that he had suffered a severe hematoma to the skull (blow to the head) prior to the fall. It was a textbook murder taken directly from the CIA Assassination Manual. |
| 1. A second autopsy demanded by relatives confirmed 'blunt force trauma’ and that the victim was rendered unconscious | |
| Inconsistencies | 2. The U.S. government conceded in an out-of-court settlement that LSD was administered to Olson without his knowledge or permission. |
| 3. Forensic experts conducting a second autopsy concluded that the first autopsy report intentionally misrepresented the true facts in order to make it appear a suicide. | |
| 4. Contrary to the first autopsy report, no lacerations were found upon the victim, even though he had supposedly crashed through and out of a plate glass window at high speed, plus a canvas shade and cloth curtain covering the shade. Even if the window shade had protected his body from cuts on the way through the window, the forensic literature reveals that individuals receive the most lacerations as parts of their body withdraw from the glass, not as they crash through it (i.e., on the way | |
| 5. The hotel room was so small that it would have been impossible for the victim to build up sufficient running speed, then catapult over the twin beds that intersected the room and crash through a plate glass window upon impact, especially one that was not very high. | |
| 6. Forensic examination determined that the body of the victim was medically consistent with the body having been dumped out the window in a semi-conscious state, rather than having intentionally crashed through it. | |
| 7. The CIA agent, Robert Lashbrook, who was “shadowing” the victim, kept changing his story about how the victim went out the window. The night manager at the hotel immediately realized that something was clearly amiss: | |
| “And here is Lashbrook sitting on a john in his skivvies and the police thought to question him and I heard him say, ‘Well all I heard was a crash.’ I walked around the room to look around. Nobody ever jumps through a window. They open the window and they go out, not dash through a shade and a sheer drape. You know, there’s no sense to that.” | |
| 8. Instead of calling the police or the hotel desk after “the accident” as might be expected, the CIA agent called his superior, CIA scientist Dr. Harold Abramson (who had sedated Olson earlier) and, in a conversation enabled and overheard by the hotel operator, stated only: | |
“Well, he’s gone.” | |
| 9. Olson had been interviewed by Military Intelligence and deemed a security risk. | |
| 10. Nine days before his death, Olson was drugged (without his knowledge or permission) with LSD and a drug known to make a person more open and talkative and then, in a drugged state, was interrogated utilizing secret interrogation techniques garnered from | |
| 11. Shortly before Olson’s death, the CIA distributed its Assassination Manual to agents (it was declassified in 1997) which details the precise method of Olson’s death as | |
| 12. In training for the assassinations unit of the Israeli Mossad (Institute for Intelligence & Special Operations), the Olson murder has been used as an example of a perfect assassination. |